This Week in Photography: An Insane Bike Video, SF’s Roughest Hood, and a Mobile Photo Mag

As the year winds down, photography starts to get ... reflective. This week we have some end-of-year prizes, crazy clouds in the Grand Canyon and the best bike video we've ever seen.

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Unusual Weather at the Grand Canyon Creates Rare Photo Op

Most people would be disappointed if they showed up to see the Grand Canyon and it was completely filled with clouds. All that driving and nothing to see. Park rangers, however, were thrilled in early December when a total inversion obscured the entire canyon. Apparently it was a once in a decade kind of weather event so they ran out and snapped photos, which are admittedly fun and unusual.

Photo: A sea of clouds fills the Grand Canyon, seen from Yavapai Point on the South Rim, on December 1, 2013. (National Park Service/Erin Whittaker)

New Show: Re-Seeing the Tenderloin

San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood has a bad reputation. Instead of high tech and high rent, it’s known for drugs and homelessness. But like any neighborhood, there’s more than meets the eye.

In an effort to let the youngest residents in the area create their own narrative about where they live, several organizations recently came together and lead a visual workshop for kids 14 to 21. The resulting show, Ain't Nothin' Tender opened Friday night at SF Camerawork on Market Street.

The participants don’t try and whitewash the problems that face the area. There is a photo of a man smoking crack and one student documented all the hypodermic needles she found. But there are also photos that express the students' hope for their hood. It’s an honest take on a place too often stereotyped and we encourage anyone in the area to stop by.

Photo: One of the photos from the workshop. By Lucely Chel, PhotoVoice

Alec Soth’s Best-Of Photobook List

Nearly everyone in the photo community pays attention to Alec Soth's annual Top 10 photo books list, went live on Monday. The only other list that is awaited with such anticipation is Martin Parr’s -- that went live last month. Perhaps it is worth noting that three books — Sergio Larrain (Aperture); Rasen Kaigan, Lieko Shiga (Akaaka); and Dalson Anatomy, Lorenzo Vitturi (Jibilana & SPBH Editions) — made it onto both lists. Does that make them gold, silver and bronze on the photobook podium?

Juried Comp of Your Surveillance and Privacy Images

There is no doubt that wearable devices, fresh legal territories, surveillance and sousveillance alike are changing what photography is and what it does for us. While it used to be artists dragging society into unknown territories, it's now the technologists, and the artists are left to hang on to the technologists’ coat tails and make some sense of it all.

Secrets & Lies, a juried photography competition, is asking for your images that “explore issues of anonymity, surveillance and the illusion of privacy in a digitally inter-connected world.” But please, no more Google Street View “curation” projects. Deadline is January 12th.

Image: Courtesy of United Photo Industries

New Video: Insanity on a Road Bike

We love road bikes here at WIRED, and we’d like to think some of us are pretty adept riders. But Road Bike Party 2 blew us all away. The guys in the video are trained mountain bike trials athletes, and normally use burlier, specialized bikes to do similar tricks. It’s downright ballsy to front flip a skinny whip off a stack of crates, or ride one through an enormous rock garden or over abandoned railroad cars.

Photo: Sim Chi Yin. From the series Rat Tribe. 33-year-old Niu Song reads a newspaper while his wife, 32-year-old Zhao Anshen embroiders. Both work as restaurant chefs.

New Magazine App Solely About Mobile Photography

FLTR, the world’s first smartphone photography magazine, launches on Monday the 16th. The mag is the brain child of Olivier Laurent of The British Journal of Photography and we see it as part of an emerging trend where people are finally creating some sensible commentary on camera phone photography and information consumption.

Photo: Courtesy of FLTR

TIME Picks the Best Wire Photographer of 2013

On Monday, Muhammed Muheisen was named TIME Magazine's wire photographer of the year. Always out in the field, always filing images, wire photographers don't always get the same accolades as the showmen of the photojournalism world.

“At-once authoritative and distinctive,” TIME says, “Muheisen’s photographs have become indispensable for news outlets the world over.”

Photo: Muhammed Muheisen/AP. July 5, 2013. Children, a choir and other well-wishers hold balloons to release them to mark former South African President Nelson Mandela completing his 27th day in the hospital, correlating with the 27 years he spent in prison during the apartheid era, outside the Mediclinic Heart Hospital where he was being treated in Pretoria, South Africa.

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